“I ... don’t know,” Jenny admitted. “I’ve found a lot of plantlike stuff along my route, but haven’t collected any of it because it seemed to me that the search for Carol and Molly had to come first. If I had picked anything up, I don’t suppose I’d be able to tell what it was doing chemically without getting it back to the lab.”
“You could do that,” Carol pointed out. “Charley could follow the river you have there and make use of whatever chance it offers of getting to us.”
“You wouldn’t mind? And you, Molly?”
“Of course we wouldn’t.” Molly was partly delighted and partly resentful at not getting the chance to do her own answering. On the whole, she decided, it was better to be delighted; she wasn’t sure just what she would have said.
Carol went on. “Pick up some specimens and get back to the tent. Joe’s point is a very good one, and we need the answer. If life forms are breaking carbamates into gas down here, there’s a local source of energy, and we need to know about it.”
“You mean we could use that life instead of the robot’s fuser?” asked Molly innocently.
“No, of course not. I meant—oh, you were joking, weren’t you?”
“Not entirely. I admit, though, that whether Charley is looking for us alone or Jenny is helping him won’t make any difference if we don’t charge our armor pretty soon. Honestly, Carrie, what do you think the chances are of the robot’s drying out?”
“I haven’t thought much about it; there’s been too much else to do. There can’t be very much ammonia left inside. We tipped it and managed to get some liquid to pour out, so things can be only damp in there. I shouldn’t think the air where we left it could be very close to saturation, so it ought to be drying and oughtn’t to take very long.”
“But it’s been a lot of hours. If it’s a lot more, and Charley doesn’t get here with more energy for our suits, you’ll never be with your Others and I won’t see Rovor and Buzz again. It’s as simple as that.”
But Carol was emotionally incapable of taking the situation that seriously. Practically none of her species could have. Fond as Molly was of the little elf, she was certainly irritating company at times.
But so, of course, was Buzz—and, she had to admit to herself, even Rovor on occasion; and Carol had, after all, done everything that either of them had been able to think of that might lengthen their lives. It was just that she wouldn’t worry. Which, Molly told herself firmly, was good.
Presumably. Probably. Obviously. The way to be.
But worrying wasn’t quite the same thing as trying to think of other constructive lines of action. Maybe there were other tunnels, with dryer currents of air, or warmer ones—why was this one so much warmer, anyway? And since it was warmer, why wasn’t it more effective in evaporating ammonia from the robot? The machine itself shouldn’t be hard to heat up, and ammonia’s temperature of vaporization wasn’t great—not by the standards of anyone made of water. Naturally, Joe hadn’t put packets of silica gel inside the machine—even if silica gel absorbed ammonia the way it did water, which seemed doubtful on what Molly remembered of the chemical structures involved. He hadn’t put in the ammonia drinkers’ equivalent of a dessicator, anyway. He hadn’t expected the robots to get wet. Not inside, that is—he’d protected them against rain, he’d said.
Enigma seemed water-free, so far; would any of the salts lying around serve as driers for ammonia? Non sequitur—but this wasn’t sequential thinking; it wasn’t much better than worrying. They had a lot of collected material, between them, that might be tried out—but that would be an act of desperation; what chance would any one of a dozen or two naturally occurring salts have of being just the substance they needed at the moment?
Maybe an act of desperation was in order, of course, but Molly shrank from the idea of anything that might resemble panic. She cared what others thought of her, and cared about her own self-respect. If she were to put anything inside the robot with the intent of speeding up the drying process, it was going to be something with a good, solid reason for her to believe had the power to absorb ammonia vapor.
She drew a sharp breath, which Carol failed to hear because her translator made no attempt to handle it. The Human was startled, however, to hear Joe’s voice.
“Molly! Is something wrong?” “No. Why do you ask?”
“You said something I gathered to mean surprise.”
“You’ve been doing some fancy work on your translator, haven’t you? Well, I don’t mind, as long as it’s you and we stay on private. I just had another idea about drying this robot.”
There was a brief silence before the Nethneen responded. “Do you really think you should use any more of your water?”
“How long have you been waiting for me to think of that?”
“I haven’t been. Your last sentence set me wondering what your idea could be, and that was all I could think of.”
“Well, you’re probably right. Yes, I see no reason not to use the water. My metabolism produces a constantly increasing amount of it anyway, if I can find anything at all for the food synthesizer to work on—anything with carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and such essentials, of course; it doesn’t transmute. In any case, I have a fair amount of excess water, and if we don’t get this unit going soon I won’t need it anyway.”
“Would Carol’s nitrosyl chloride surplus be equally effective?”
“I don’t know enough detailed chemistry to guess, and I wouldn’t ask her anyway; she’s too small, and an equivalent amount would be too much of her reserves. We’ll use water.” Molly switched back to the general channel by ceasing to whisper. “Carrie, I’ve thought of something else we can try to get the ammonia out of this machine. It bonds very tightly to water. If we seal it up with a liter or so of ice inside, any liquid that vaporizes should be taken care of fairly quickly.”
“You can furnish that much water?”
“Yes. If we don’t try, I won’t need the water anyway.” She couldn’t make herself omit that point, though she knew it couldn’t reach her companion’s feelings. “Do you have any collecting cans I can use? Mine were full before you caught up with me.” Molly was already opening the appropriate part of her armor.
The Shervah hesitated. “Mine are full, too. All with these life forms, unless that stuff I slipped on was something else. Yours have mostly just mineral samples, don’t they?”
Molly was detached enough to be genuinely amused rather than indignant. “Yes, most of mine can be replaced easily enough. I’ll dump one and use it for the water.” She felt a slight temptation to use the can containing the metallic dust from the upper cave, but was not that childish. Besides, she wanted to know what it was herself, and as far as either of them knew it was not replaceable.
Carol watched with interest while the can was nearly filled with liquid. Molly waited a few minutes, until ice needles began to show across its surface, before placing it inside the robot. “There’s no need to complicate matters with water vapor—or more of it than we can help. Even ice sublimes, but at this pressure it should be a slow process. Also, when this works and the robot starts up, it would be too bad if any motion spilled liquid water into its plumbing; we’d never get rid of that.”
“The two together may be liquid at this temperature,” Carol pointed out uneasily, “but the machine is standing upright; all it should do is lift to normal float height when its power goes back on. It shouldn’t tilt.”
“Better get yourselves on it, though, once the ice is inside and the port closed,” Joe put in. “Power might come on when it was merely safe from the machine’s standpoint, but with unknown and unpredictable commands sneaked in from the circuits shorted by the electrolyte. At the very least, Carol should be ready to open the access port and cut off main power manually the moment it shows signs of misbehavior.”